Re: Security patching and the branching workflow: a new security-updates branch

["Léo Le Bouter" <lle-bout@zaclys.net>]

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On Sat, 2021-03-27 at 14:56 +0100, zimoun wrote:
> Oh, I am a big boy and I can think whatever I want! :-)
> 
> Kidding aside.

...

> 
> First, what does it mean «risk»?  How do you evaluate it?  Is it a
> relative evaluation or an absolute one?

Most if not all users do not want their machines to be compromised or
any side-effects of that.

> Second, I am not arguing that security is not important.  I am saying
> that security is important, as important as everything else that is
> also
> important.  What does it mean «important»?  How do you evaluate
> it?  Is it a
> relative evaluation or an absolute one?

Having security-updates branch or any other mechanism to ship security
updates promptly does not mean that the rest is not important.

> Third, I am aligned with Leo’s words [1].  And probably with yours
> too. :-) To me, a better security is not implied by special
> treatments for security fixes but instead a better treatment for the
> updates in general.

Security updates *need* special treatment. We already specially treat
them with grafts because it's an absolute necessity. We already have
private disclosure mailing lists in GNU Guix because security updates
need special treatment.

> 
> You are proposing a new branch and Chris and I are saying that this
> branch already exists and is staging.  The real question is to know
> how
> staging currently behaves: how many time between 2 merges?  how many
> time to rebuild?  how many packages are rebuilt between 2
> merges?  etc.
> Is it enough?  If not, what could be done to improve?  etc.

The question whether this is solved by a branch or by making pushing to
master directly big rebuilds more viable, that I do not know, but you
cannot put forward the arguments you've made, they do not work.

Léo

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